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I don't think that you should be per­fectly candid and frank about the intimate details of your personal life with the public at large. Subsequently, it creates consider­able personal problems.

Tom Waits

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Tom Waits
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: December 7
Actor
Composer
Guitarist
Jazz Guitarist
Pianist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Writer
Pomona
California
Thomas Alan Waits
Personal
Candid
Public
Frank
Problem
Intimate
Able
Creates
Think
Details
Thinking
Consider
Life
Large
Problems
Subsequently

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My first big gig was an opening show for Frank Zappa, and I think that was difficult.
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If you record the sound of bacon in a frying pan and play it back, it sounds like the pops and cracks on an old 33 1/3 recording. Almost exactly like that. You could substitute it for that sound.
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There's nothing that makes me laugh more than being in the situation where you're not supposed to laugh. Funerals. People crying. Breaking down. Telling you their life. I'm the worst. I'm the worst at that.
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She's a shiksa goddess and a trapeze artist, all of that. She can fix the truck...she's outta this world...she's bold, inventive and fearless. That's who you wanna go in the woods with, right? Somebody who finishes your sentences for you.
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I’ve never met anyone who made it with a chick because they owned a Tom Waits album. I’ve got all three, and it’s never helped me.
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Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.
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We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.
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A mental midget with the IQ of a fence post.
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It wasn't good for my nerves, that kind of work - a fireman. I've got high blood pressure. I get upset easily. I don't think that was a proper career alternative for me.
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They called it the Terminal Bar but they had no idea that like twenty years later the place'd be filling up with terminal cases.
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Most vagabonds i knowed don't ever want to find the culprit that remains the object of their long relentless quest. The obsession's in the chasing and not the apprehending, the pursuit you see and never the arrest - Tom Waits Foreign Affairs
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It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.
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The Universe is making music all the time.
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The folks who know the truth aren't talking.... The ones who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up!
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The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.
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I used to imagine that making it in music - really making it in music - is if you're an old man going by a schoolyard and you hear children singing your songs, playing jump-rope, or on the swings. That's the ultimate. You're in the culture.
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You know, we just buy music now. We don't make it any more. And that goes for just about everything. I think it's so important that people develop and subscribe to and have confidence in their own ability to make music, however rough it is.
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I was a fireman. I lived in the fire sta­tion for about a year. The pay wasn't so good. It was kind of like being in the army, or what I imagine that would be like.
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If you're a writer you know that the stories don't come to you, you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were.
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I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox.
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